Remember all those threads I got from the Little Thread Shop, not to mention several smaller lots from West End Embroidery? Some of these were Threadworx, which come in pre-cut lengths and are therefore put on little wooden rings like my standard perles, but most of them were not, and so they need to be wound on bobbins. There are a lot of threads on our dining room table waiting to be wound on bobbins …

The trouble with winding bobbins from skeins of Caron or hand-dyed perles is that they don’t always behave the way they should. Ideally, you take the label off the skein, unloop it if it’s been looped together once or twice, and then you’re left with a sort of ring of thread – start at one of the cut ends and unwind from the skein as you wind onto the bobbin. Simple. Unfortunately these skeins, which are often twisted, have a habit of tangling most annoyingly as you unwind them, however gradually you do it, leading to a lot of muttering-under-the-breath and stopping to undo knots. One way of keeping the untwisted skein from misbehaving is to ask a kind person to hold it looped around their hands while you’re winding (as in Harold Harvey’s Winding Wool, below), but I felt that this was probably too much to ask of my helpful and supportive husband in view of the quantities involved.

One way which I have used in the past is derived from the kind-person-holding-skein method and involves looping one end of the ring of thread around my knee with the other end lying in my lap. (A version with the ring of thread looped around both knees not only proved to be unworkable, but also caused such loud guffawing in anyone who happened to see it that even if it had worked I would have given it up.)

The one-knee method is far from ideal, however, and so I started looking for what you might call a pair of mechanical helping hands. I temporarily considered the two little thingummybobs that hold the sheet music on the stand of the pianola, but as that would mean sitting with my back towards anyone else in the room for hours on end I dismissed it. It did put the idea of music stands into my mind, though; my own (used many years ago for guitar lessons) is unfortunately of the sort that is like a flat lectern, but my husband reminded me that youngest son’s music stand was one of those folding metal affairs. Would it work?

It did . So this weekend it will be me and my music stand, tackling bobbins and skeins. And done in this way, it is actually quite relaxing!